Saturday, June 09, 2012

Maurice Pialat

I've been watching quite a few Maurice Pialat films lately and Passe ton Bac d'abord struck a chord with me. Thank you to Masters of Cinema and Eureka for putting out a nice DVD with a great booklet that features an essay by Craig Keller. Thanks to Joe Swanberg for letting me borrow it. Here is Craig's final paragraph in that essay. I am a sucker for this kind of stuff.

And that's the cinema. Films play back the same way every time. We return to them over and over again, even when they reveal unpleasant truths - or pose insolent questions the answers to which it's up to us to formulate (not regurgitate), to construct with our own battered material. The movies are mentors: we keep coming back out of admiration for their moxie. They're a conversation, a sitting for a self-examination. The 'characters' don't have a destiny because they don't need one. We do. For better or for worse, we are the cinema.